Canada: Surging to Nationhood

Long into the night the combines clattered and roared, their headlights
probing like huge pale fingers into the golden sea of Saskatchewan's
wheatfields. As the harvest gathered momentum across the 1,000-mile
sweep of the Canadian prairies last week, the empty, echoing granaries
filled with the largest crop in the nation's historya crop that is
already sold out, as is all the grain the prairies can grow for the
rest of the decade. With the rumble of the harvest came a cacophony of
Canadian sounds that, taken together, sounded unmistakably like boom....